HERE in Blighty, we know a thing or two about things being ‘cancelled’. Be it dentist appointments, bank accounts, or train services, we are more than accustomed to events, services and modes of transport being cast aside at a moment’s notice. But in recent years ‘cancellation’ has gained a more sinister meaning, having become a shorthand for public shaming or professional ruin over a perceived offence.
Even Taylor Swift has borrowed the term, singing on her latest album that she ‘likes her friends cancelled’, a throwaway line likely aimed at the outrage surrounding her fiancé’s Trump-supporting milieu. But for most of us, ‘cancellation’ is not something to joke about. The consequences can be life-altering.
Take the case of writer and teacher Kate Clanchy. Accused of racism on the flimsiest possible grounds over descriptions in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, she was subjected to a years-long campaign of abuse and professional isolation so intense that she says she felt suicidal. Only this week, more than three years after they ‘cancelled’ her, did her publisher Pan Macmillan issue an apology.
Clanchy’s ordeal is one of the clearer examples of cancellation operating as an unjust punishment. But the term is now tossed around so casually that it is often used to deflect from legitimate criticism. Being criticised is not the same as being wrongly hounded from your job or violently threatened. A functioning society depends on the distinction.
Perhaps there is no better example of this misguided use of the term ‘cancellation’ than the recent furore prompted by the American right’s flagship think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
Within 48 hours of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson sitting down for a cosy chat with openly far-right streamer Nick Fuentes, Heritage president Kevin Roberts released a statement denouncing a ‘venomous coalition attempting to cancel’ Carlson. He insisted that the right must ‘stand by friends’ and ‘not cancel its own’.
This framing is dishonest. With some public figures, the nature of what people might find worrying about them is not confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt, although this is plainly not the case when it comes to Carlson and Fuentes.
Fuentes has described Hitler as ‘really f***ing cool’, jokingly signalled his Holocaust denial, and spoke of executing ‘perfidious Jews’. Not to mention his nasty remarks about interracial marriage, and claim that ‘lots of women want to be raped’. He recently told Carlson’s podcast that he admired mass murder Joseph Stalin and despised ‘organised Jewry’.
Aside from Fuentes, Carlson has repeatedly platformed guests promoting conspiracy theories. Recently, he interviewed an Orthodox nun who framed Hamas as ‘resistance’ and asserted that Palestinians were the first Christians. He did not challenge her.
Calling the criticism of this behaviour a ‘cancellation’ invites conservatives to see any disagreement as treachery, reframing moral standards as weakness. Naturally, it ignores the bile Fuentes and Carlson have directed toward conservatives themselves.
But if the right claims to care about truth, order or civilisation, it cannot regard open racialism, anti-Semitism and the lies that prop them up as mere ‘slightly different opinions within the family’. A political movement that cannot draw such boundaries will eventually have no identity worth defending.
Proper pluralism requires debate, disagreement and sometimes sharp criticism. What it does not oblige us to do is tiptoe around people whose views are corrosive to the very values we should claim to uphold. If the conservative movement wants to be taken seriously, it cannot outsource its moral compass to a reflexive fear of being accused of ‘cancelling’ someone it has no business entertaining.
Not every criticism is a bad faith attack, and not every ‘friendship’ is worth defending regardless of someone’s behaviour.
